A couple of weekends ago we were a little hard up for something to do, and we’d heard that there was a little shore town called Algarrobo, a little way outside of Santiago, that housed the largest swimming pool in the world. That was all we needed. We decided to go check it out.
Some dude was blocking the view of the pool.
The ocean was right next to the giant pool. I think it may also have been slightly larger.
Waves rock.
So we walked all the way down the length of the pool on the outside (just over a kilometer long!), and we wanted to get in to get a closer look at it. Unfortunately, the buildings on the grounds aren’t hotels–they’re apartments. You have to be a resident to use the pool! We puzzled for a while over why in the world somebody would build a tourist attraction like this and then make it a requirement that you live there to be able to check it out.
Anyway, eventually we decided that we’d tell the guy we were interested in renting one of the apartments. That worked, and he let us in to go to the open house. Of course, we took some detours to take some pictures before we got there.
As you can see, we were being very, very stealthy.
It's hard to get a good idea of how huge this thing was just from pictures.
Louganis.
This pool was so big it had little pools in it.
A dock. In this picture I am standing on a dock in a pool. With boats.
About ten seconds later, the guard at the front gate stopped us from taking pictures and asked us to go to the open house.
We didn't stop taking pictures. This is from the eleventh floor balcony, where the open house was.
Me with my open house brochure next to the plan for the whole complex.
Couple of pelicans.
While it was something fun to check out for the afternoon, I doubt I will be renting an apartment there. There’s only so much fun you can have in a giant swimming pool. Just because the thing is 6,000 times the size of a regular swimming pool doesn’t mean it’s 6,000 times as fun.
On the way back, we stopped at a vineyard called Viña Indomita. It was closed, but we still got a couple of photos. Enjoy!
Landscape.
The main building at Viña Indomita. Very imposing, no?
Livin' on the edge.
They didn't let me buy wine, but they let me pretend to buy wine.
I think that under ideal conditions, these chairs would have cushions on them.
This place is totally in your face.
OK, so that’s it for that day trip. Next up, I’ll be putting up a post about my recent trip to Bariloche, Argentina. Maybe two posts, actually, since I’ve got a whole lot of pictures. Until next time!
A few weeks ago (I know, I know, I’ve been horrible about updating this thing), I went to a vineyard named Viña Santa Rita. It was winter, so there wasn’t really anything to see in the fields themselves, but the tour was very cool, there was a wonderful lunch with it, and the wine was wonderful. Without further ado, the pictures.
Me and Teresita in the courtyard
A big willow tree outside the main building.
Tanks. You're welcome!
Surprisingly, there was a lot of wine at this place.
This cellar was built in the 1870s out of sand, lime and egg whites.
The Last Temptation of Christ was apparently booze.
Me, Teresita, and Gene, after enjoying a delicious lunch.
After finishing up at the vineyard, we continued onward to Pomaire. This is a little town that is literally not on the map. At least the map in the GPS that we were using. We got off the highway and were suddenly, according to the GPS, in some white wasteland devoid of roads. The electronic voice sounded vaguely concerned as she kept repeating, “When possible, make a legal U-turn.”
Anyway, Pomaire is a little town that’s basically composed of one street full of shops and restaurants. They make all kinds of stuff out of clay there in Pomaire, most notably what are called “chanchitos,” which you’ll see soon enough.
Chanchitos! And a sleeping cat.
A little church at the end of the road. Jesus was apparently on break from wine stomping.
Pomaire. Really, that's about all there is to it.
My haul: a coffee mug, a chanchito, two bottles of wine, and a Viña Santa Rita wine glass.
Nothing too exciting about that day, I guess. But that brings me one step closer to being up to date with my posts. Only two more posts and about a hundred more pictures and I’ll be up to date.
Two posts down from this one is a post about how I drove up a mountain in a snowstorm to try to go skiing. When I got back to work on Monday, people admonished me that I shouldn’t have gone, because the road is dangerous and people die. I thought they were exaggerating. But this past weekend, there was a series of landslides on that very road, and two people died.
I guess the title should be reversed, were I being chronologically accurate, but I think “The Virgin and the Zoo” sounds better than “The Zoo and the Virgin.” Regardless, I’ll get makin’ with the pictures.
A few weekends ago I decided to go to Cerro San Cristobal, which is a hill in downtown Santiago with a giant statue of the Virgin Mary on top and a zoo near the bottom. So here, without further ado, are some pictures from my visit to the zoo.
When I know Spanish, this will be profound.
Some weird alien bird with antennae.
Lovebirds, loving.
The rarely seen amputee bird.
What are you looking at, pencilneck?
Cats of all sizes just love to sleep.
So cool he's got a name. Leon.
I think this is what happens when you smoke.
The saddest monkey I've ever seen.
Sad Monkey is sad.
I'm a Toys R Us Kid!
I hate every ape I see from Chimpan A to Chimpan Z.
Shots of this guy from the back weren't really flattering.
Zebras have striped mohawks. Totally punk.
The self-conscious hippopotamus.
After the zoo, I started hiking up the hill to the Virgin. I thought it would be a nice leisurely stroll, so I decided not to use the elevator that would have taken me straight to the top. It was a bit more exhausting than I’d anticipated, but I was glad I did it. I even got to stop for an empanada on the way. Here are some pictures from the trip up to the Virgin.
So close and yet so far.
I thought the framing here was kind of cool. Your mileage may vary.
Santiago: Mountains and smog.
A view from (near) the top.
Jesus!
All in all, a good trip to have made. Easy to get to, a nice way to spend an afternoon, and a good way to see the parts of the city that aren’t obscured by pollution.
Boy, time sure flies down here. I thought it had been maybe a week since I’d updated this thing, but it turns out it’s been more than two. That’s a sorry state of affairs, my friends, and I apologize for it. When I get home this evening and have access to my pictures, I’ll write a couple of posts about the past couple of weekends (Viña Santa Rita/Pomaire and San Alfonso del Mar, respectively).
As for me, though, things are going well. My trip has been extended to the beginning of December, minus the trip I’d already planned for the first half of October (Peru, Easter Island, Patagonia, and the US for my cousin’s wedding). I switched apartments on Monday, from the eighth to the fifteenth floor, and I now have a much nicer view from my balcony. One of these days I’ll have to actually unpack, I think.
Last night my friend Denisse had a bunch of people over for dinner (there were eight of us), and we had a veritable feast. Salad, rice and curry, Toad in the Hole (a British dish with sausages, Yorkshire pudding, mashed potatoes and gravy), porkchops, wine, mojitos, and homemade flan. I have become a flan fan.
In about two weeks, I’m going to try to go to Bariloche (sometimes called, I hear, the Switzerland of South America, though I’m not entirely sure what that means), and the weekend after that should be Macchu Picchu. I’ll try to do better on keeping this thing up to date!
On Friday afternoon, it was decided that I, along with two friends, was going to go back up to Valle Nevado to go skiing. Our schedule was a little tight, because one friend had to catch a flight at 8:15, so we couldn’t afford to operate on the schedule of the vans that go up the hill and don’t leave until 5:00 pm. What did that mean? Well, since I am the one with the rental car, it meant that I would have to make the scary drive up the mountain. Friday evening I was a little freaked out about it, to be honest.
Saturday morning I should have gotten way more freaked out. It was raining pretty heavily when we left, around 9:30 or so, which meant it was pretty certain that it would be snowing up the mountain. But we pressed on, finding our way mostly by instinct. The first thing we noticed was that, as it turns out, those “falling rocks” signs are pretty accurate. None fell on us, but there were biggish rocks all over the road, dislodged by the rain.
A little way up the hill, we came to the Carabinero (Chilean police) checkpoint, where they told us that we wouldn’t be allowed past without chains for our tires. We had to turn around and go a few minutes back, where there were some fellows renting sets of chains for 10,000 Chilean pesos (~$19). That got us past the checkpoint, and then we had to pay someone further up the road 5,000 pesos to put them on, since none of us had any idea how to do it.
Anyway, that got us into the intense section of the road. The one with all the crazy switchbacks. Not far up, we noticed that the rain was turning to snow, though it wasn’t yet sticking to the roads. By curve 15, we stopped to get the chains put on our car. By that point, they were pretty necessary. The snow was coming down quite heavily, and there were a number of cars, vans and buses waylaid by the side of the road as we made our way up. At one point we got stuck in a little traffic jam, and some wild horses decided to join us for the fun:
Eventually the traffic started moving again, and we slowly made our way up the hill. I thought it was pretty fun how every time we rounded one of the sharp corners, the back end of the car would slide its way around, since those tires didn’t have any grip on the road at all. I don’t know if my passengers shared my amusement. Part of the way up to Valle Nevado, there is a group of other, less fancy ski resorts. Since it was taking us longer than we thought it would to get up, and since the weather was bound to get worse if we decided to drive further up to Valle Nevado, we decided to go to one of the less glitzy places. That’s how we ended up at El Colorado.
On the road that split between El Colorado and one of the other resorts (I forgot its name), we picked up a fellow who was going our way, but whose group was going the other way. I didn’t understand all of what he was saying, but he was very inquisitive. That was one of our good deeds for the day. When we finally got to the parking lot and stopped for a second to look around for a parking spot, we realized that the car was moving even though I had my foot on the brake. That’s because it was moving sideways, down a little hill. I laughed, because really, what else are you going to do? We didn’t hit anything, and we came to rest just in a little different part of the parking lot, found a parking spot, and headed to the rental shop.
On our way to the rental shop, we noticed, by accident, that there was a fresh accumulation of about 2 feet of snow on the ground, with more coming down by the minute. None of us are experts in winter sports, so we figured that would just make things awesome. Because how could more snow make skiing worse, right?
Wrong.
By the time we got our equipment, got our tickets, and got to the slopes, not only had I already slipped and fallen once (I slipped and fell again later on, getting a drink in the little cafeteria), but we realized that that two-foot deep snow? That was everywhere. And it made it really hard to, like, move. At all. Here’s a picture of me gazing meaningfully off into the distance, to give you an idea of what it was like out there:
That’s what the snow was like everywhere. I have skis on in the picture above. I promise. You just can’t see them. What you can see is those weird ski lifts in the background. What they’d do is hook one of those bars, put it under your butt, and let it pull you up the hill while you stood. Instead of sitting in a chair or something, it was just dragging you on the ground. It was the only part of the day where I felt like I was actually skiing. The first time I went up, I fell off at some point, when I got nervous, and I had a hell of a time getting up and out of the way. Eventually I did, and I got over to the slope, and I continued to have a hard time getting up every time I fell down. It was partly because the skis would slide out from under me just a little bit every time I’d try, and partly because with such deep snow, falling down was just so comfortable. I did eventually make it down, even picking up a decent little bit of speed at the end and not even falling over. Score.
So I went back up, didn’t fall off the lift this time, and went to the slope on the other side of the lift. The one that was, apparently, less heavily trafficked. Big mistake. I didn’t fall the whole way down the hill, but I didn’t get going at all, either. I basically walked down the hill, through 2 feet of snow, with skis on my feet. Sometimes I would try to push myself with my poles, and that would only work a tiny little bit. The snow was heavy and clumpy enough that I wouldn’t just have to move myself, but all of the snow that was up to 2 or 3 feet in front of me, too. By the time I got back down to the bottom of the hill, I decided I was done with the skiing for the day. Pretty soon, my friends decided the same.
That’s us, and a stray dog who was quite busy licking himself. Right after this, we returned our stuff and made our way back to the car, where we were approached by a desperate Argentinian woman who needed some help for her husband. He was having a bad reaction to the altitude, and they needed to get back down to Farellones, one of the other ski resorts, where they had rented their equipment. It was on our way, so we agreed to take them, though between 5 people and two sets of skis and poles, it was pretty tight in the little Volkswagen Polo subcompact car that I’ve got. We got them safely down to Farellones, and they were very grateful. That was our other good deed for the day.
The ride down the hill was a bit more treacherous than the ride up. See, it had been snowing heavily the whole time we were skiing (so to speak), and the roads were no better than when we’d gone up. There were some times when, even creeping down in first gear and with the chains giving us traction, I didn’t feel fully in control of the car. Which is not a place you want to be on a mountain road with no guardrails in a snowstorm. But I kept it together, and everything turned out fine. We even saw some more horses on our way down, which we thought was pretty cool. One group was just chilling in the middle of the road:
The white and brown horse in the foreground had one eye that was really light blue, like a Siberian Husky’s. The other group of horses that we saw was perched on a hill like a bunch of mountain goats:
The other thing we saw on the way down, that I just thought was crazy cool, was a bunch of cactuses covered in snow:
Just looks wrong somehow, doesn’t it?
Eventually we made it down the hill safely. We learned how to take chains off of the tires of a car by the side of the road, and in so doing were drenched by passing cars. Santiago was just a little bit too low to have gotten any of the snow instead of rain, but it was nice to drive in normal bad weather conditions instead of nightmarishly bad weather conditions.
So, on the way home today, I heard this song on the radio:
I had been unaware that the song existed apart from the creepy Valentine’s Day scene in Billy Madison.
On the way up to Valle Nevado a week and a half ago, I heard this:
The Twin Peaks theme has always creeped the hell out of me for some reason. It’s quietly ominous. Which made the no-guardrails ride up the mountain that much creepier.
When I went grocery shopping last night, I didn’t really do it with any intention of what to make for dinner. I just picked up a bunch of stuff with a vague idea that it might go together into a coherent meal. Well, I managed to cook it all up tonight, and I’m pleased to say that it came out pretty well!
I started out with a quarter of a big yellow onion and about a half of one of those big garlic bulbs, chopped. I put them in a frying pan with some extra virgin olive oil and let them cook for a while. Meantime, I chopped up half a green pepper and about 100 g of mushrooms (it was a 200 g package, and I tried to take about half), and I threw them into the pan as well. I’m not a big fan of mushrooms, and when I put them in, they threatened to overwhelm the mixture, so I promptly sprinkled in a generous helping of cumin, because I love cumin and want it to be in my life. I let that mixture cook for a while, and then I tossed in two small steaks, each about a quarter of a pound. I fried them up on each side, surrounding them and covering them with the vegetable mixture. I threw in some Worcestershire sauce at some point, to spice things up, and when the meat was cooked all the way through, I put one of the steaks and half of the vegetables on a plate and put the rest in the fridge.
On top of that, I had some lettuce, carrots, cucumbers and Caesar dressing, so I made myself a salad. I chopped up a carrot and a cucumber and a bit of lettuce and just threw it into a bowl with a little bit of dressing. Normally a whole cucumber would have been way too much, but when the best implement you have with which to peel it is a butcher knife, trust me, by the time you’re done, you’ll be down to a manageable amount of cucumber.
Anyway, dinner was hasty and improvised and not pasta and good. I was proud of myself.
I haven’t done anything interesting enough to merit a post lately, and for that I apologize. To myself, as well as to whomever is reading, since I would like to be doing interesting stuff. But I figured I would put up a post just relating a few things that have been going through my mind lately.
Most of the time even when it’s nice here, it’s just the tiniest bit hazy, and that makes the mountains look like a painting. Like the old Paramount logo. I kind of love that.
Speaking of looking like paintings, when I went out grocery shopping last night, I got to the store at sunset, and the sky had an eerie sort of beauty to it. The street was bathed in an orange glow, like there was a giant arc-sodium streetlight overhead. I was sad for a second that I didn’t have my camera, but I wasn’t in a good vantage point to get any decent shots anyway. That eerie light, though, made everything seem otherworldly.
Since Santiago is surrounded by mountains, there are often times in the early morning and late evening where it’s light out, but you can’t see the sun. I don’t really have anything specific to say about this, besides that I think it contributes to that eerie light at sunset, and sometimes at sunrise, with light seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere.
This weekend I went to the mall and stopped by a bookstore. I was looking for books that I’ve read a bunch of times before, but translated into Spanish, to help me practice understanding the language. There was a big Stephen King section, and I’m a big Stephen King fan, but the paperbacks were inordinately expensive, so I ultimately said no to those. I did get two books, though. One is a compilation of Orwell’s Animal Farm (Rebelión en la Granja) and 1984 (1984). The other is Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by Gabriel García Márquez. I read all of these books in English in high school, so at least I’ve got some idea of what’s going on in them. I started Animal Farm last night, and it’s slow going, but I understand a lot more of it than you might expect. The only problem is that when I’m at home and reading it, it’s even slower going, because I’m constantly going to my computer to look up words that I don’t know. What I can predict, though, is that this line will pop up: Todos los animales son iguales, pero algunos animales son más iguales que otros.
Now to check…
Yes! That line appears, exactly as I wrote it, on page 106. Spanish is easy.
This past Sunday, I went skiing at Valle Nevado, which is a ski resort in the Andes Mountains about an hour and a half or so outside of Santiago. I don’t ski well in general, and I didn’t that day specifically, but I had a good time. I mainly wanted to show you a video and a few pictures, though. First, the video. This is a short video I took on the ride up to Valle Nevado.
You see those hairpin turns we keep making? There were over 50 of those as we worked our way up into the mountains. I was fine, but I know a few of the people in the back were getting nauseous from all of those tight turns. In fact, I’ll also share with you a link to Google Maps, which shows an aerial view of the road we took. You can follow it off to the right all the way up to Valle Nevado.
OK, other than that, I’ve just got a couple of pictures. First, the hotel:
I thought it was pretty cool looking.
Next, a picture I took when the sun was right behind one of the mountains:
Last, but most definitely not least, 3 pictures of the amazing sunset. I could stare at these all day. I literally took pictures of it until my camera’s battery died.
I thought it was pretty cool looking.
Discussion!